


(oh my god they were zoommates)

by therudestflower



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: All children get adopted and don't die it's just a rule, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Office, Gen, M/M, Pandemic - Freeform, Physical Distancing, This was written by an adult who spends all day on Zoom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:01:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23419393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therudestflower/pseuds/therudestflower
Summary: Going from a sea of cubicles to working from home is nice, all things considered.Being randomly assigned to a social hour Zoom room with a hot guy on the other side of the floor? That's way nicer.
Relationships: Chris Argent/Peter Hale, Isaac Lahey/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 10
Kudos: 156





	(oh my god they were zoommates)

**Author's Note:**

> This is not meant to directly reflect the current pandemic, or make light of it. It's just how two guys in their twenties might talk about something like it while stressed and trying to impress each other. The policies, locations, laws, timeline etc are not meant to reflect current or future realities.

There was something to be said for having a job during the apocalypse 

Yes, Stiles always knew when he went corporate he was selling out, but student loans weren’t cheap. Dreams of revolutionizing virtual point of sale systems (God, was that really his dream?) could wait until he was a top mid-level salesman for Arctic Advertising. One year. Tops. 

It was actually awesome, switching from a floor with hundreds of cubicles to his couch. His job was mostly over the phone anyway, and management took way too long panicking over how to move a phone-based business to....cell phones. 

Scott was working from home too, but taking it much more seriously, obviously. He turned his bedroom into a home office, while Stiles worked on the couch, occasionally sitting in front of a blank wall for Zoom calls. 

It took two weeks for their town to move to shelter in place. It took two weeks and two days for HR to institute “Buddy Groups” that were required to meet over Zoom for half an hour in the middle of the day. To keep up morale, and provide “social experiences” as though he was staring at a wall every minute he wasn’t working. He spent his whole life talking to Scott, and video chatting with college friends, the last thing he needed was randos. Stiles emailed the generic HR email asking if he could be with his actual work friends, and someone named Melina :D replied “You’ll be with random people in any department, maybe someone new :D” 

:D 

“Scott!” Stiles yelled right before his first call. “Do you want to come on this playdate with me?” 

Scott walked over to where Stiles was sitting against the wall beside the TV and leaned over to see his Zoom waiting room. “Not really?” 

The meeting opened up, and Stiles joined a blurry screen. There were supposed to be six people in the group, but the only Zoom connection was labeled “Isaac Argent.” Stiles could see someone moving around, but it was totally blurry and his bets were on one of the sad old people. 

Suddenly the screen cleared up, revealing Hot Guy #3. Fucking nice. Hot Guy #3 worked at the entirely other end of his floor, so his rank has more to do with distance than hotness because. Fucking nice. 

The picture blurred. “Hey,” Stiles said. “Still figuring out Zoom?” 

“Just--fucking--hold on.” The screen moved abruptly, and a few minutes later the picture was clear and Hot Guy #3 was sitting in front of a window. He realized his mistake quickly and groaned, then swiveled his computer and moved to sit in front of an improbably nice kitchen. “Hi.” 

“Hey. Think everyone else got lost?” 

“Yep,” Hot Gu--Isaac Argent said, “Everyone on my team is acting like clicking a Zoom link is too much to ask. You’re in Sales, right?” 

Stiles knew that he worked in Recruitment based on where he sat, so he figured Isaac figured that the same way but it meant they’d both noticed each other. 

“Yeah. I’m Stiles.”

“Isaac. Sales sucking right now?” 

“Yep,” Stiles said, “It’s been a really great few weeks, not a lot of people trying to get their logo on some cups.” 

“You work on commission?” Isaac asked. 

“Usually, yeah. They’ve agreed to up our base pay to cover it right now,” Stiles said, “I’m kind of spending all day trying to look enough like I’m working just enough to not get in trouble.” 

Isaac scoffed. “Sounds like a lot of work.” 

Stiles thought about the amount of energy he spent checking if he’d sent enough emails that day. “It is. Thank you for recognizing that. How’s recruitment?” 

“Oh you know,” Isaac said, which Stiles understood to mean that it sucked. “I’m kind of just reckoning with the reality that my job is to review billions of resumes from desperate people during a hiring freeze. I’m just waiting for Arctic to eliminate me.” 

That idea hadn’t even crossed Stiles’ mind. He’d been joking around about how non-essential his job was but in the real world, non-essential jobs were killed. Fuck. 

“Hey, do you make a lot of money on the recruitment side of the office?” Stiles asked. No way he was talking with Hot Guy about how he hadn’t given a single thought to how Stiles--yes he definitely understood that now--was definitely going to lose his job. Fuck. What was the point of going to college and becoming so damn clever? No one mentioned that less than a year later there’d be a  _ pandemic.  _

Isaac paused, then seemed to understand and looked behind himself at the kitchen. “This is my dad’s house. My apartment is a nightmare, it’s probably broken into by now.”

“If my dad had a kitchen like that, I’d totally be there too.” 

“Yeah,” Isaac said, “He asked me to come up here, way before things go bad.” 

“Canada?” Stiles suggested.

“Oregon,” Isaac corrected. “Not Portland, but.” 

“Oh shit!” 

“Yeah, he is very upset, he’s acting like he’s guaranteed my death. I don’t care. I’d rather be here than alone in my apartment. Are you still in Sacramento?”

Stiles pointed to the ceiling, which counted for yes. “My roommate has a real job. He’s one of those awful people who made it big two seconds after graduation. And, my dad works in law enforcement so his house is germ city.”

“Gross.

“So we’re both stuck in our houses, like, legally.” 

“Thank god HR is making sure we’re socializing,” Isaac said sarcastically. “I’m just devastated that we didn’t spend half this thing telling other people to turn on and off their mic.” 

“Yeah,” Stiles laughed, “this was actually kind of cool though?” 

“Yeah,” Isaac said, “here’s hoping our other buddies manage to show up tomorrow.” 

Stiles seriously, seriously hoped they didn’t.

* * *

Life super sucked, and Isaac knew that he was in a nice house with weird dads and his weird sisters and lots of people were much worse off, but it was already getting really old. That was why he spent all of his workday waiting for 2:30, when he went to his Buddy Zoom Room. Three days passed with no one else coming on the call, so he and Stiles swapped Arctic gossip on the second day, and on the third day he took up Stiles’ challenge to figure out his legal name. 

“I have access to personnel files,” Isaac reminded him, pulling it up after stalling for twenty minutes. “You know that, right?” 

“Fuck, this is so much more fun when I don’t do it with recruiters.” 

He decided to just go straight to the kitchen before the call. The crappy WiFi in his bedroom was fine for most calls, but it was nice to be able to see someone clearly for once. 

“Can you go?” he asked Malia when he walked in. “I have a work call.” Malia lifted up her plate of pancakes wordlessly. “Can you eat that somewhere else?” 

“No,” she said, “I cannot. You are hurting my feelings so badly right now, Isaac.” 

He groaned and brought his laptop into her room, because at least that had to be unoccupied. “I’m using your room!” he yelled. 

“Good luck looking professional!” 

When Stiles started the call, he immediately demanded, “Are you in a child’s bedroom?” 

Malia actually lived there all the time, which meant  _ she  _ chose the 70’s flower wallpaper that Isaac was sitting on the floor in front of. “Are you in a porno?” he shot back. 

Stiles pulled a shocked face. “Dude, this is a work call? Also, what is porno about my beautiful space?”

“It’s just like, sad taupe you get with those weird porn apartments.” 

“Yeah,” Stiles acknowledged, “but like, mostly like sad first apartment apartments. Okay, that explains my extremely innocent--and not at all worth that kind or response--wall. Explain yours.”

“I’m in my sister’s room. She’s an adult though.” 

“Explain.” 

“I can’t. She is not a person you explain. Why don’t you have a desk to do your job at? I’m just here because WiFi is bad near my room.”

Stiles said, “Brace yourself,” and stood up. He turned his laptop around, showing a small apartment. He must have been sitting behind a kitchen table, which he slowly revealed as covered in empty glasses and stacked dirty plates. He turned to show a frat-looking couch with duct tape, and a fleece blanket bunched on one end. “Okay,” Stiles narrated, keeping the webcam on the apartment, “so this is where I normally work?” He walked through a door and revealed a seriously depressing bedroom. 

There was a lot of sunlight, and what looked like a sliding door leading to a patio, but no furniture. A suitcase and inflatable mattress wasn’t furniture. 

“Dude!” he said loudly. “What the fuck?” 

Stiles put the laptop on the floor and collapsed in front of it, with the air mattress in view. “I barely just started making money! I’m a child! Don’t tell me your apartment doesn’t look like this. Unless you're way older than you look.” 

“How old do I look?” 

“Sixteen,” Stiles declared.

“I got mistaken for a total adult when I was a sixteen, so thanks.” 

“Fine,” Stiles said, “You’ve been out of college two years max, at the  _ most  _ you have a twin mattress.” 

Okay, so Dads definitely helped him buy furniture but he would have been able to on his own, just crappier furniture. “Dude, you have to make decent money at Arctic. And you’ve worked there six months at least, do you have a drug habit?” 

“Work call,” Stiles reminded him, “but no! And--you’ve noticed how long I worked there?” 

Fuck. “Recruitment,” Isaac reminded him, “I did some of your paperwork when you were hired. Hey, do you know who else is supposed to be on this call?” 

Stiles shrugged, “No idea. But I don’t feel a big rush to hunt them down. We’re getting paid to fuck around, let’s keep this going as long as we can.” 

* * *

Ten minutes into a call, someone named Jolene Z. joined the call while they were in the middle of talking about how monsters in movies seemed to have lube on them. They both shut up right away. Her camera turned on and she said, “Is this the buddy thing?” 

“No,” Isaac said, before Stiles could even come up with a lie. “No, we’re talking about the Codex system.” 

“God, I’m sick of these zoom links,” Jolene said, and hung up. 

They were silent for another moment, waiting for her to realize she’d entered a room labeled Buddy Room 31. When she didn’t come back, Stiles picked right up where they left off. “So is it mucus, is it lube they applied, or is it the girl...stuff.” 

“The girl stuff,” Isaac repeated. 

Oh god, Stiles studied this so hard at one point. Back when he thought a theoretical knowledge, a scientific base, would make sex less terrifying. He totally knew the word. “The, the stuff that happens in vaginas?” 

“Oh my god,” Isaac said. 

“You don’t know what it is either!” Stiles yelled. 

“I don’t have sex with women!” Isaac defended, “I can tell you lube brand names, but this is not something I need to know.” 

They went silent again, maybe both hit with the sharp awareness that they were in a corporate Zoom room. 

But fuck that. The world was on fire, rules didn’t apply. 

“I can name lube brands,” Stiles said, “but I also really should know what the girl stuff is called.” 

“I expect you to have that for me tomorrow,” Isaac said. 

* * *

“Arousal fluid,” Stiles said the next day. He’d given up the pretense of doing work, and he wasn’t alone. Isaac answered wearing a sweatshirt with a hood up. “Next time I have sex with someone with a vagina, I’m going to dazzle them.” 

“Well I don’t have a vagina,” Isaac said offhandedly, peeling an orange without looking at the screen. “So you honestly could have waited.” 

* * *

Scott joined the Buddy Call the second week on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly, Isaac warmed up to him immediately, and they learned that they’d probably met at track meets during high school. Stiles felt like a third wheel until he grabbed the laptop and said, “My turn, my turn. I don’t suppose you went to academic decathlons? We could have met there.” 

Isaac pretended to think. “No. I didn’t go to academic decathlons. I went to like, prom and had sex and stuff, did you do that?” 

“Yeah! I did! But probably not in the same room as you did.” 

Isaac grinned. “Probably not. That’d be really creepy.” 

“Unless we were having sex with each other.” 

“Eh. Still creepy. I’m older than you, it would have been a senior and a freshman.” 

“But twenty-six and twenty-three isn’t creepy,” Stiles pointed out, very aware that he was pushing it really hard. “However, breaking shelter in place is creepy, and so would be wrong until this pandemic is over.” 

Thirty minutes a day had brought them this far very quickly, but Stiles still spent every nano-second before he responded analyzing. It was awesome when Isaac snorted and said, “Well the pandemic will be over someday. When we’re both in Sacramento we can hang out.”

Stiles grinned. “Okay, but I was talking about having awkward sex in a local motel.” 

“Yeah, that too, obviously.” 

Isaac was the one who said, “Hey, maybe we should be talking about this in a company Zoom room?” 

Yep. Way too far. “Yeah. Shit. Yeah, sorry. I’ll back off.” 

“No no,” Isaac said quickly, “I mean, we could just talk on Hangouts after work? Or like, even just have it going while we’re working, it’s not like they’re checking our WiFi. I could go for talking for more than half an hour a day. Cool?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, doing the Zoom thumbs up that was such a big part of his life now, “way cool.” 

* * *

Isaac moved around Dads’ house a lot, trying to find places where he had okay WiFi, which meant that eventually, Stiles met his entire family.

Chris was the last one, because he was quarantining for two weeks, but Stiles did hear his voice when Isaac walked by the master bedroom and said, “My dad is in there because he kept working at the food bank until the government told him to stop,” and Dad yelled, “Is someone  _ here? _ ” 

Peter came and sat next to him for a full phone call, but didn’t so much as talk, just stared at Stiles. Stiles kept up Isaac’s attempts to keep conversation, but stared right back. 

“He’s technically my step-dad,” Isaac said by way of apology. 

“I have been in your life exactly two weeks fewer than my husband,” he said, not breaking an increasingly intense stare with Stiles. Who was keeping it up, even though it was so not necessary. It was kind of amazing. What kind of person was Stiles that he taking this not just in stride, but as a challenge? Peter seemed to agree, he abruptly broke eye contact and said, “I like him.” Then walked away. 

“If you meet my dad, I want to remember this,” Stiles said, easy as anything. 

If they hadn’t joked about having sex multiple times, Isaac would have thought that Stiles was straight based on how he reacted to Malia and Allison. Allison was working from home too, and her job actually needed her, so she just walked through the kitchen in a blazer and torn joggers and leaned over and said, “Hi,” then “Can you guys stop in an hour? I have a call with national, I need the WiFi.” 

Malia did not have a job, she had hours to hang out with him and Stiles and for an annoying hour, while they were supposed to be working, Malia and Stiles talked at triple pace about some graphic novel series they both liked. 

“Hey so, your entire family is very hot.” 

“Ew.”

“Seriously. The dad I met is hot. The other dad has hot-voice. Your  _ sisters.”  _

“Oh my god, I am going to hang up on you.” 

“What! Are any of you biologically related? All I’m saying is--” 

“Jesus, fuck you!”

With wide eyes, Stiles held up hands in surrender. “What? Oh my god! I didn’t mean  _ that.  _ I was saying what are the odds of that level of hotness coming together however you came together! Ew!” 

“Ew,” Isaac agreed. “You’re not allowed to think my sisters are hotter than I am, by the way.” 

“Oh, I totally don’t,” Stiles assured him, “they are hideous cows.” 

“You can’t say that either!” 

Stiles groaned. “I can’t suggest incest, I can’t call your sisters cows, what  _ can  _ I say?” 

Isaac tried to hold it back, but he started laughing, and he couldn’t stop. Stiles tried to keep a serious face, like he was very upset by these limitations, but soon he was laughing too and they kept going until Stiles was lying on the floor gasping, “I’m in an international emergency, and I’m not even allowed to call women cows.” 

* * *

They lost their jobs on the same day, which was kind of fun. They actually lost their jobs at the exact same time, on separate mass emails. Isaac called him on hangouts, and began reading his termination email out loud. 

When he was done, he looked at the screen and asked, “Did you get the exact same email?” 

“Replace ‘recruitment’ with ‘sales’ and yep.” 

“HR has gotten lazy, man.” 

Stiles wanted to feel bad about it, but just like everything since this started, at most he felt abstract distress. “Guess I’m gonna end up on the street!” 

“You can’t be on the street, it’s illegal. Don’t you have six months of savings?” Stiles had been looking at the email on the phone, but split his gaze to shoot Isaac a scandalized look. “I’m kidding.” 

“It’s okay. I mean. It’s okay. I have a few months of rent, Scott bought ten thousand pounds of food. God, this all sucks!” 

“Yep,” Isaac said. Stiles felt a little annoyed, he could clearly see that Isaac was in a damn nice house and he’d been out of college longer, there was no way this meant the same thing it did to Stiles. But he dismissed that quickly. They’d both been fired, and honestly, they were both privileged as fuck. 

_ Still.  _

“So like, what the fuck now?” he asked. “You’re the recruiter, are there any jobs out there?” 

Isaac just sighed. “Not like this. There’s delivery jobs, high-risk jobs. That’s it. I don’t know. I just feel so fucking useless. I can’t do anything. I hate being stuck anywhere.”

Stiles had started just calling from his bedroom, usually on his phone, so he climbed onto his air mattress and pulled a blanket over himself. “Buzzfeed says a routine and drinking water will keep me alive.” 

“What kind of routine?” 

“I don’t know. All their suggestions included baths and yoga, so.”

“Shit. Yeah. You can hang out with Scott more?” 

“No. Scott is a legitimate adult, not to put a lot of pressure on you, but you’re my main squeeze.” Hey, he’d gotten fired, what could go so wrong? It wasn’t like they’d see each other in their huge office. 

Isaac was in another random part of the house, but he must have been near someone because he looked around before saying, “Yeah, I kind of fucking hate everyone right now? The fact that you can’t take my good peanut butter really helps our relationship.” 

Yes, good. “I swear to you, I’d never take your peanut butter. Not that I’ll ever have the chance.” 

Isaac shrugged, “Life is long, man. There's a lot of time and peanut butter to be taken.” 

* * *

As weeks passed, they ran out of normal things to talk about or do, so they made plenty up. They played a game where each of them had to find the oldest thing they owned, then the most expensive thing they owned. 

“This isn’t my house,” Isaac pointed out, holding up a pair of really disgusting sneakers. Like, really disgusting. Just caked in mud with super grimy laces, “So it’s not my oldest possession, but it’s the oldest thing here.” 

“Explain.”

“I set a record in these,” Isaac said, as a complete explanation.

“But didn’t you tell me that your parents moved there when you were in college? So either you brought them to college, then brought them to that house, or you told them not to throw them away and required your fathers to bring muddy sneakers across state lines.” 

Isaac looked at him and held them up, “Okay, but it’s mud from that race. I feel like you don’t get this at all. It’s okay. What do you have?”

From behind his back, Stiles pulled out his cloth-covered button. “Do you know the kid's book Corduroy?” Isaac shook his head, and Stiles hurriedly said, “Okay, so the relevant part is this teddy bear gets left behind in an old school mall, and he loses his button and then steals one for a mattress in a store? Like, that drawing made me feel like there was nothing in this world more satisfying than pulling a button of a mattress. And I was super devastated, so my mom found me a bunch of cloth-covered buttons, and she’d loosely sew them to pillows so I could pull them off.” 

He waited for some response, because people always responded to that story, not that he told it a ton. But Isaac just nodded and said, “Okay. That was nice of her.” 

“It’s like a sentimental childhood thing,” Stiles explained. 

“No I get it, it’s cool,” Isaac said, “What’s your most expensive thing?” 

They compared Stiles’ phone and Isaac’s much nicer shoes, but Sties couldn’t help coming back to, “I feel like we really didn’t understand each other's oldest thing? Is that okay?”

“It’s just shoes and a button,” Isaac said, “There are a lot weirder things about me, and definitely about you too.” 

And that was plenty true. 

* * *

Things didn’t so much calm down as run out of steam. The other side of the curve looked like hair salons opening up just a few days after Stiles gave up and went at his own head with clippers (and Scott finished it off, with major improvements.) It looked like businesses beginning to hire again, and Dad having more than twelve hours off at a time. It felt like the entire world had been taken over by aliens for a few months, and now they were reclaiming their lives. Stiles bought a bike on Craigslist and biked around the city, and day by day saw stores reopen and people out, still six feet apart. But still out. 

California relaxed first, and people were encouraged to carefully start expanding their social circle into what they called ‘Isolated Cells’, one health person at a time. Traveling across state lines was permitted again, and Isaac abruptly said he was coming back to Sacramento. 

“Why?” Stiles asked. They were talking on the phone while he drove, and Stiles worked on applications for new organizations that had cropped up in the virus response, and needed cheap college-educated labor. “You can work anywhere, and I bet your dads were sad.” 

“Honestly? I really, really miss my bed. And the WiFi is much better in my apartment, which I need for my new job,” he got distracted for a minute swearing at another driver, then said, “Also, I figure we can add each other to our Isolated Cells? I’ve just been with my family so I’m germ-free, and--”

“Yeah,” Stiles said quickly. “Yeah totally. Totally. Just let me know when you’re ready.” 

* * *

They decided on a park. Not so much because Isaac thought Stiles might murder him or anything, but because Isaac’s apartment was a mess and he didn’t want to share the meeting with Scott, as much as they liked each other. 

It didn’t come up until that week, but they lived only a few blocks from each other, and Hollow Park was just a two-minute walk. He had to work really hard not to invent a reason to be late, or think too much about how he dressed. He was definitely on time, but Stiles was there first. 

Puzzle pieces and fractions of Stiles came together when he was right there in person. Stiles’ stupid quarantine haircut looked no worse than Isaac’s quarantine outgrowth. He was a fully real person and Isaac could feel himself grinning as they walked toward each other. They stopped a few feet apart. 

“I’m Stiles,” he said. 

“Isaac. You’re way shorter than I thought.” 

“Well your face hasn’t pixelated at all yet, so we’re both disappointed.” 

“I think we can get past it.” 


End file.
